Senior Platform/Solution Architect

The Senior Platform/Solution Architect – Capacity Planning, Performance & Cloud Infrastructure Architecture is responsible for translating business demand, application traffic and workload characteristics into quantifiable infrastructure requirements across microservices, Kubernetes/OpenShift, cloud and on-premises environments. The role provides the technical capability to determine CPU, memory, pod/replica, node, cluster, database, storage and network requirements while ensuring performance, scalability, resilience, availability and cost efficiency.

• Lead capacity planning and infrastructure dimensioning for applications, platforms and microservices-based services.
• Translate business growth, transaction volumes and traffic forecasts into infrastructure capacity requirements.
• Develop quantitative workload models covering normal, peak, burst and exceptional traffic conditions.
• Determine appropriate CPU, memory, pod/replica, node and cluster requirements for application services.
• Develop capacity forecasts and infrastructure roadmaps covering short-, medium- and long-term demand.
• Ensure capacity plans support availability, resilience, disaster recovery and business continuity requirements.
• Provide architecture and capacity recommendations for both cloud and on-premises environments.
• Review existing environments to identify over-provisioning, under-provisioning, bottlenecks and capacity risks.
• Assess resource consumption and performance characteristics of individual microservices.
• Determine minimum, normal and maximum pod/replica requirements based on workload and service-level objectives.
• Define CPU and memory requests and limits for containers.
• Assess horizontal and vertical scaling requirements and define appropriate scaling policies.
• Determine node density, resource utilisation and cluster capacity requirements.
• Account for service-to-service communication, platform overhead and infrastructure reserve capacity.
• Establish repeatable sizing methodologies for new applications and services.
• Validate sizing assumptions through performance and capacity testing.
• Define and maintain standard parameters for application and infrastructure capacity planning.
• Analyse requests per second RPS, transactions per second TPS, concurrent users, sessions and transaction volumes.
• Analyse average, peak and burst traffic and associated growth patterns.
• Assess CPU utilisation, CPU consumption per transaction, memory utilisation, memory peaks and application heap requirements.
• Assess pod counts, replica requirements, scaling thresholds and scaling response times.
• Determine node CPU, node memory and allocatable cluster capacity.
• Assess database TPS, connections, CPU, memory, IOPS and throughput.
• Assess storage capacity, IOPS, throughput and growth.
• Assess network bandwidth, latency and packet rates.
• Factor in high availability, N+1/N+2 resilience, disaster recovery, growth headroom and operational reserve.
• Lead performance engineering and capacity validation for critical applications and platforms.
• Define and oversee load, stress, endurance, spike, scalability and capacity testing.
• Analyse throughput, response time, latency, concurrency and resource utilisation.
• Identify application, platform, database, storage and network bottlenecks.
• Establish performance baselines and capacity thresholds.
• Use performance test results to validate CPU, memory, pod, node and cluster sizing.
• Work with engineering teams to optimise resource consumption and performance.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field.
• Minimum of 8 years of experience in IT infrastructure, cloud architecture, or platform engineering.
• At least 5 years of experience in capacity planning, performance engineering, or infrastructure architecture.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes/OpenShift, microservices architecture, and containerization.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and on-premises environments.
• Deep understanding of CPU, memory, storage, and network resource management.
• Proficiency in performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter, LoadRunner) and monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).
• Knowledge of database performance, including TPS, connections, IOPS, and throughput.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.